The potential of computers for increasing the
control of organizations or society over their members and for invading the
privacy of those members has caused considerable concern. The
privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and
maintenance of data files that assemble information about persons from a
multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valuable for many kinds
of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they
endanger human freedom or seriously enhance their opportunities of blackmailers.
While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of
comprehensive data files has never before been the limiting barrier to the
suppression of human freedom. Making the computer the villain
in the invasion of privacy or encroachment on civil liberties simply divers
attention from the real dangers. Computer data bank files can and must be given
the highest degree of protection from abuse. But we must be careful also, that
we do not employ such crude methods of protection as to deprive our society of
important data it needs to understand its down social processes and to analyze
its problems. Perhaps the most important question of all about
the computer is what it has come and will do to man’s view of himself and his
place in the universe. The most heated attacks on the computer are not focused
on its possible economic effects, its presumed destruction of job satisfaction,
or its threat to privacy and liberty, but upon the claim that it causes people
to be viewed, and to view themselves, as machines. What the
computer and progress in artificial intelligence challenge are an ethic that
rests on man’s apartness from the rest of nature. An alternative ethic, of
course, views man as a part of nature, governed by nature law, subject to the
forces of gravity and the demands of his body. The debate about artificial
intelligence and the simulation of man’s thinking is, in considerable part, a
confrontation of these two views of man’s place in the universe. Why is it important to prevent the abuse of computer data banks
A. To protect the right of the individual.
B. To maintain discipline in society.
C. To encourage economic and social research.
D. To collect wide-ranging information.